Accessibility
Screen Readers
Free screen readers are available online. For your convenience,
we have provided a quick link to NVDA, which is a screen reader for
Microsoft Windows that is free, fully functional and
portable.
NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) software enables blind and
vision impaired people to use a computer by communicating what is
on the screen using a synthetic voice or braille.
Visit the NVDA website to download the
free screen reader software.
Sefton Council is committed to making its online resources
accessible to all visitors. We regularlly review our site and
modify pages to remove accessibility problems for people with
disabilities and to make information more accessible for all
users.
We take our responsibilities under the Disability
Discrimination Act (DDA) very seriously and our website design
is being improved to follow the accessibility guidelines issued by
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Royal National Institute
for the Blind (RNIB).
Changing the settings on your browser
There are many features built into modern web browsers which
allow personal preferences to be set - for example the adjustment
of colours and text size. These features can usually be found by
asking for 'Help' in your browser program and entering the phrase
'accessibility'.
We’ve tried to create a site which doesn’t get in the way when
you change these settings. For advice on changing settings, check
out the BBC’s accessibility
pages.
You can choose your operating system (e.g Windows), your Browser
(e.g Internet Explorer) and the problem you’re trying to fix.
You’ll then get lots of relevant advice on accessibility
settings.
The following is a list of some of the actions we have already
taken in order to improve accessibility of the Sefton website:
- Use of 'alternative text' to describe images. This is useful
for text-based browsers and/or for users with visual
impairments.
- Implementation of 'skip menu' feature to allow users of speech
or text rendering software to bypass the menu structure of a page
and go straight to the content.
- Links to the Adobe Acrobat Access reader for PDF Adobe Acrobat files.
- Use of 'cascading style sheets' (CSS) which means that it is
easy for a user to over-ride page settings to make it easier for
them to view the page. In this way you can:
- Increase contrast between background and text for readability
purposes;
- Change text colours;
- Change background colours.
- Ensuring that fields in online forms can be navigated in order
by pressing 'Tab' in a keyboard.
Please let us know of any accessibility issues you encounter
whilst using our web site by emailing webteam@sefton.gov.uk
No Access Keys?
Based upon advice from Nomensa, recognised Web Accessibility
experts, we have decided to no longer provide Access keys on this
website.
A quote from them:
"Access keys are not used by the people who are supposed to use
them, and could even hinder people if poorly implemented. The time
would be better spent on a technique that is known to work, such as
skip links.
Although access keys are intended to improve site navigation, it
is shown they actually can interfere with web accessibility. In
terms of implementing a common standard, it would require a
universal understanding of access keys to be applied to every
site."
Downloads (PDF, Word and Excel)
This site uses a large number of PDF documents to supplement the
many thousands of pages of content. PDF documents can be read using
Adobe
Acrobat Reader and the later versions of the Reader (Acrobat
Reader 7 onwards) contain many capabilities specifically designed
to make it easier for people with disabilities to read PDF files,
regardless of whether the files have been optimised for
accessibility.
More information on accessibility features of Adobe Acrobat
Reader is available from the Adobe
Website.
Where Microsoft Office (Word, Excel) documents have been used,
we would advise users who do not have Microsoft Office to download
the appropriate office viewer from Microsoft's site;
Last Updated on 5/16/2013